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The Apostles of the Interior Life, our sisters here at St. Lawrence, were featured in a beautiful article this week in the Lawrence Journal-World, and it is important that as often as we are disappointed in the media for casting the Church in a negative light, we should also thank them for the positive exposure they do give the Church. Even the New York Times recently ran some stories about the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, who are doing tremendous work with the poor in the south Bronx. The story in the Lawrence Journal-World did a good job of telling the vocation stories, albeit in short form, of Sr. Debbie and Sr. Loredana. Included was a brief mention of how Sr. Debbie and Sr. Loredana discerned between great opportunities to become married and this call that they felt to be married directly to the Lord, and to serve him in religious life.
One of the great treasures of our Catholic tradition and way of life is this beautiful interplay that we experience between the married vocation and the religious vocation and its promise of celibacy for the sake of the kingdom. Both vocations depend deeply on the virtue of chastity - loving purely and unselfishly in the same way that God has first loved us. The vocations are lived differently, of course, but they intersect quite beautifully in our Church in the same way that a husband and wife take different roles but interact to form a whole in a marriage. The religious vocation is of course dependent first upon the vocation of marriage. I do not know a single priest or religious who is not deeply grateful that his or her parents were not a priest or a sister. That goes without saying. As we see in today's great feast given by our Church, Jesus' vocation and mission began within the holy family, with his dependence upon the sacrament of marriage between Joseph and Mary. It was in the family that his vocation was received and nurtured.
The marriage vocation, in turn, is greatly enriched, especially in these times when the definitions of marriage and family are constantly trying to be re-defined within modern society, by the religious vocation. The religious vocation gives witness that although having a family is a great good to be pursued, that God is always the ultimate good to be pursued, and marriage and children are gifts that we receive from God. We see in Abraham and Joseph this obedience to the command of God to go where God commands them to go, and do what God commands them to do. Abraham and Joseph receive their families as a gift from God, and He is the ultimate Father of their families. Abraham is willing to sacrifice Isaac, his only Son, and Joseph presents Jesus in the temple in today's Gospel, showing that these men do not see their wives or their children as their property, but as precious gifts from God. These fathers are men of true obedience, and faith and generosity. They are the foundation of a holy family.
The religious vocation gives witness in today's world that God's grace is enough to fulfill the deepest needs for intimacy within a human person. The religious vocation, while always being dependent upon the married vocation for its existence, gives married couples and families encouragement to continue to make God and His will the center of their marriage, their family and their home. If we see our families as great gifts from God, and are able to celebrate His presence in our lives especially during this great season of Christmas, we may be able to keep our family lives strong, despite all the initiatives to redefine what it means to be married, be a family, and to have children. And as we pray for each other, to help keep our families strong in faith, hope, love and in obedience to God's will, let us do everything we can to be foster-families to those who are in need of a community of love. +m
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